LIMA:Peruvians were still waiting for their next president to be confirmed on Monday, more than a week after a polarizing run-off vote, with socialist Pedro Castillo clinging to a narrow lead that would tilt the country firmly to the left.
The election count, which has increased by only 0.01% since Saturday and stands at 99.945% tallied, showed the former teacher with 50.14%.
Castillo is fewer than 50,000 votes ahead of right-wing rival Keiko Fujimori, who has made allegations of fraud, though with little proof.
Castillo, 51, little-known before a surprise win in the first-round vote in April, has rattled the copper-rich Andean country’s political and business elite with plans to redraft the constitution and sharply hike taxes on mining.
He has said Peruvians have already “chosen their path” while his far-left Free Peru party has hailed victory, despite attempts by Fujimori to annul some votes that went against her holding up the official confirmation of the result.
It is still unclear when the country’s electoral body will formally announce the winner, though Castillo has called for the count to be wrapped up quickly to end the uncertainty.
Fujimori, 46, scion of a powerful political family and daughter of ex-president Alberto Fujimori, who is serving jail time for corruption and human rights abuses, has vowed to fight on until the last vote is counted.
Magaly Roca, who was listening to a radio program on the vote count in her corner store in Lima, said she had voted for Castillo in the second round although he was not initially her preferred candidate. Fujimori even less so, she said.
“She’s been putting up too many obstacles,” said the 42-year-old. “All the time she had the majority in Congress, she blocked everything. She’s the reason we haven’t moved forward before. I don’t consider her capable of ruling.”
Carlos Gurmendi, who works as a porter in a residential district, said he had reluctantly cast his vote for Fujimori. “I voted for the lesser of two evils,” the 66-year-old said.
Gurmendi considers the current political situation an embarrassment but adds that “there could have been fraud, it wouldn’t be anything unusual”.
Castillo’s party has rejected Fujimori’s accusations of fraud and international observers of the process in Lima have said that the elections were carried out cleanly.
MIXED VIEWS
If confirmed, Castillo’s win would be a major boon for the region’s political left. The socialist hails from a poor area of northern Peru and has galvanized the rural vote, angry at feeling left behind in Peru’s growth story.
Flavio Quispe, who is originally from Puno in southern Peru but now runs a small business in the capital, said he voted for Castillo because he feels left behind by previous governments.
“The people were abandoned,” said the 70-year-old of his home province. “They made so many promises but not even water arrived.”
On the corner store of a busy Lima market, where her family had been selling fresh fish for more than three decades, Monica said she had not voted for either candidate in the run-off, but she was worried about sharp changes under Castillo.
“I won’t wait until this country turns into another Venezuela. Now, my plan is to go where my family is: the United States,” the 52-year-old said, declining to give her surname in case it put at risk her plans to join her family.
Castillo has recently sought to appease financial markets with a moderate-left platform, but it remains unclear if his administration will ultimately keep that tone or revert to the party’s roots as a far-left organization.
A Venezuelan migrant working as a manicurist who embellishes acrylic nails said she was “terrified” of a Castillo presidency. She declined to give her name for fear of deportation as she had been living in Peru undocumented since 2019.
“I left Venezuela because our country has been destroyed,” she said. “It’s very sad what happened in these elections – we’ve already lived through this.”
Rising levels of poverty and inequality have also cast a harsh spotlight on the traditional political elites, which has been intensified by the world’s deadliest per capita COVID-19 outbreak that has hammered the mining-driven economy.
Marches by supporters of both candidates have broken out in Lima over the past week, with some voters in favor of Castillo arriving to the capital from rural areas to protest and Fujimori supporters backing her accusations of fraud.
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